History Literature / ThePentagonWar

Nevertheless, the story became one of my favorites, and wouldn't leave my mind. I fleshed out the alien species, trying to make them really ''[[StarfishAliens alien]]''. I made a [[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/pentgame hex-map-based war game]] out of it, using a lot of ideas I gleaned from ''TabletopGame/StarFleetBattles''. I built an entire [[http://www.stellar-database.com astronomy website]] to answer the question "how far is it from star X to star Y?". I toyed off and on with turning it into a full blown novel to be ''proud'' of. I hammered on the plot elements to make 'em pass the [[{{Realism}} reality check]], both from a "is that physically possible?" standpoint and from a "what kind of moron would do such a thing?" standpoint. And, when my eyes first gazed upon the earlier version of the MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness page from this very website -- in 2009, nearly 30 years after writing that first draft -- I finally decided to get serious about writing the novel.

Nevertheless, the story became one of my favorites, and wouldn't leave my mind. I fleshed out the alien species, trying to make them really ''[[StarfishAliens alien]]''. I made a [[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/pentgame hex-map-based war game]] out of it, using a lot of ideas I gleaned from ''TabletopGame/StarFleetBattles''. I built an entire [[http://www.stellar-database.com astronomy website]] to answer the question "how far is it from star X to star Y?". I toyed off and on with turning it into a full blown novel to be ''proud'' of. I hammered on the plot elements to make 'em pass the [[{{Realism}} reality check]], both from a "is that physically possible?" standpoint and from a "what kind of moron would do such a thing?" standpoint. And, when my eyes first gazed upon the earlier version of the MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness page from this very website -- nearly 30 years after writing that first draft -- I finally decided to get serious about writing the novel.

Here's a link to the '''[[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/Pentagon/Pentagon1.html first chapter]]''', which contains links to all 16 subsequent chapters. As of the time of this writing, only the '''first nine chapters''' are complete, but I intend to remedy that in the coming months.

Here's a link to the '''[[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/Pentagon/Pentagon1.html first chapter]]''', which contains links to all 16 subsequent chapters. As of the time of this writing, only the '''first eight chapters''' are complete, but I intend to remedy that in the coming months.

* CallASmeerpARabbit: In chapter 13, Torra Zorra describes the ''baaai(t)i'' native to its species' homeworld as "Centaurian lichen."

** Similarly, in chapter 13, Ken Tractor and Torra Zorra discover that [[spoiler:the late Mad Scientist's Zero Drive allows them to travel at controllable FTL speeds when they pass through a hyper hole. They can thus steer to any other hyper hole in existence, linked or not, and pop back out into Real Space there. The implications for interstellar expansion are staggering]].

* SpaceBattle: Chapters 5, 6, 9, 14, and 15.

* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: Averted as hard as the author could manage.

** And, no, none of the species that evolved on ''either'' of the two Earthlike planets in the Alpha Centauri system are [[HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy small furry creatures]].

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* {{Prequel}}: The Author's Notes list three possible prequels: ''Second Contact'', dealing with the first attempt to communicate between Alpha Centaurians and humans (after they try to exterminate one another); ''North Mars'', dealing with the brief war between two neighboring Martian colonies established shortly after the advent of QC&C-powered space travel; and ''Xenoepidemic'', dealing with the outbreak of a Centaurian bacterial disease among the human colonists of Mars (and the outbreak of a human bacterial disease among the Centaurians there).

* AllOfIt: Humanity's desperate fight against the Centaurians at Second Contact, 147 years before the story opens.
-->"We had an enormous arsenal — it was much easier to refurbish left-over Cold War ICBMs than to build new missiles — and the moment the Centaurians fired at the first silo, we launched them ''all''."

* TemporalParadox: Only because FTL travel is involved. The author takes the same approach as GregoryBenford's ''Timescape'', and assumes that paradoxes create indeterminate states where the triggering events both do, and don't, occur. Since most of these paradoxes last for less than a trillionth of a second, they have no impact on macroscopic events.

* OperatorIncompatibility: Workstations designed for Centaurian use will have 360-degree video displays, surround keyboards, and pedals that accept input from the biological wheels in the user's feet -- but will never, ever have a 3-D display.

** The standard megnetic protection field that most combat spacecraft (and Station Jove) use kinda-sorta qualifies, but it can only affect charged particles and small pieces of ferromagnetic shrapnel. It won't affect lasers, projectiles that don't have any iron in them, or the gamma rays from a nuclear blast, and it isn't powerful enough to push big projectiles aside even if they ''are'' made out of iron.

[[caption-width:350:Probably not ThePentagon you had in mind.]]

*** Or [[Film/{{Avatar}} smurfy cats]].

** Conversely, Centaurians' lack of a sense of smell means they also lack sinuses and nasal cavities. When they try to speak human languages, it souds like a hubad with his dose stuffed up.[[hottip:*:It sounds like a human with his nose stuffed up.]] It also gives them an accent reminiscent of [[RockyAndBullwinkle Bullwinkle Moose]] or [[Film/PeeWeesBigAdventure Pee Wee Herman]].
*** This means their native words don't have M's or N's in them -- with two notable exceptions: "Gellimand" (the Centaurian personification of light), and "Krammer" (the head honcho of CN Leonis). These two Centaurian words appeared in the original 40-page short story, which was written before the author had designed the Centaurian species; they are retained for [[GrandfatherClause historical reasons only]].

* FourFingeredHands: The Centaurians. And they have 4 of these 4-fingered hands each.

* OnlyTheAuthorCanSaveThemNow: Jimmy Carter's space limousine, when it has to get past a hostile Gate Guard.

In 1980, at the tender age of 15, [[Tropers/{{tracer}} this troper]] thought, "Why do wars always have ''two'' sides fighting each other? Why not a war with, say, ''five'' sides?". So saying, I hauled out my dad's mechanical typewriter and banged out a [[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/stories/pentagon_1980.html 40-page story]] in which I tried to describe a "realistic" space war between five star systems. Since hyperspace corridors connected each of the five systems to its neigbors, forming a crude pentagon shape in space, I called this story ''The Pentagon War''.

* IntentionalNightmareFuel: Boundary shear. Imagine travelling through a hyper hole to another star system, and discovering your arm or leg was back in the system you came from.

Nevertheless, the story became one of my favorites, and wouldn't leave my mind. I fleshed out the alien species, trying to make them really ''[[StarfishAliens alien]]''. I made a [[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/pentgame hex-map-based war game]] out of it, using a lot of ideas I gleaned from ''StarFleetBattles''. I built an entire [[http://www.stellar-database.com astronomy website]] to answer the question "how far is it from star X to star Y?". I toyed off and on with turning it into a full blown novel to be ''proud'' of. I hammered on the plot elements to make 'em pass the [[{{Realism}} reality check]], both from a "is that physically possible?" standpoint and from a "what kind of moron would do such a thing?" standpoint. And, when my eyes first gazed upon the earlier version of the MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness page from this very website -- nearly 30 years after writing that first draft -- I finally decided to get serious about writing the novel.

* Prequel: The Author's Notes list three possible prequels: ''Second Contact'', dealing with the first attempt to communicate between Alpha Centaurians and humans (after they try to exterminate one another); ''North Mars'', dealing with the brief war between two neighboring Martian colonies established shortly after the advent of QC&C-powered space travel; and ''Xenoepidemic'', dealing with the outbreak of a Centaurian bacterial disease among the human colonists of Mars (and the outbreak of a human bacterial disease among the Centaurians there).

* ShoutOut: The name Ken Tractor is a shout-out to Ken Tracton, author of several books on TRS-80 BASIC.

In 1980, at the tender age of 15, [[Tropers/{{tracer}} this troper]] thought, "Why do wars always have ''two'' sides fighting each other? Why not a war with, say ''five'' sides?". So saying, I hauled out my dad's mechanical typewriter and banged out a [[http://www.rogermwilcox.com/stories/pentagon_1980.html 40-page story]] in which I tried to describe a "realistic" space war between five star systems. Since hyperspace corridors connected each of the five systems to its neigbors, forming a crude pentagon shape in space, I called this story ''The Pentagon War''.

-->Past the last and most recent ex-Chairholder statue stood the hallway's final crown jewel, a corner display stand with its own internal lighting, made out of that rarest of building materials: wood, ''real'' wood, from a real tree.
** In the early days of Human-Centauri, ''plastic'' was likewise an expensive and hard-to-get material, since the (lifeless) asteroids of the system had no petroleum. Hydrocarbons, such as plastic, had to be synthesized atom-by-atom.

* NanoMachines: "Nanoassemblers" are used to create complex organic compounds in star systems devoid of biomolecular materials (e.g. the lifeless asteroids of Human-Centauri).